BoardTracker for Making Contact

Although BoardTracker is primarily a search engine and message tracking service, an interesting side-effect of the alerts mechanism is that people can and often do use it in order to contact other people who use BoardTracker even if they do not normally frequent the same forums.

How and why goes like this.. say you are an affiliate of amazon.com for example and you have tried to contact them via email but for various reasons (spam filtering, bad routing, overworked support or affiliate reps or whatever) they didn't get your email and/or you got no reply.

Now you know (or hope) that the company or person you are trying to contact also uses BoardTracker since it is beneficial to their business, so you can start a thread on any board using keywords which you assume that person will be tracking - in this case it's safe to assume the amazon affiliate rep would be tracking something like "amazon affiliates" or "amazon affiliate program" so they will get an alert from BoardTracker either by Jabber or by email since they will likely have whitelisted BoardTracker alerts.

This benefits both parties, not just the person trying to make contact, since it is quite common for emails from potential or existing clients to be blocked or lost in the ether and obviously you can't whitelist everyone, particulary people you don't yet know! So now using the power and convenience of BoardTracker, people can easily contact you through any forum just by starting a thread with your name or company name or other relevant keyword which is likely to trigger your BoardTracker alerts allowing you to respond appropriately and in a timely fashion which, if you are a business, further enhances your reputation.